Thursday, November 08, 2012

Eli is going to break two of his personal rules, first to post on non-climate/non-education related political things at Rabett Run, and second to send the bunnies over to the dark side, but this has to be shared.

Various of the Romney information technology people are looking for their next job and bragging on something called Project ORCA. They have sold a number of journalists on this super spiffy thing, but the reality, the reality is to fall on the floor laughing and never to be able to arise.

From the Ace of Spades (Eli prefers the Ace of Cakes) a report from ground level. Go over there and read the whole thing and the comments, but make sure you have no liquids or solids in your mouth lest you need a new screen

What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.

Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP'seffort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

continuing. . .

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Remember, Mitt was the closer, the glad hand brought on at the end of the negotiation to seal the deal.

On one of the last conference calls (I believe it was on Saturday night), they told us that our packets would be arriving shortly. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet". Some people on Twitter were wondering if that meant a packet in the mail or a pdf or what. Finally, my packet arrived at 4PM on Monday afternoon as an emailed 60 page pdf. Nothing came in the mail. Because I was out most of the day, I only got around to seeing it at around 10PM Monday night. So, I sat down and cursed as I would have to print out 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. Naturally, for reasons I can't begin to comprehend, my printer would not print in black and white with an empty magenta cartridge (No HP, I will never buy another one of your products ever again).

So, at this point I became panicked. I was expected to be at the polls at 6:45AM and nothing was open. I was thankfully able to find a Kinko's open until 11PM that was able to print it out and bind it for me, but this is not something I should have had to do. They expected 75-80 year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day? From what I hear, other people had similar experiences. In fact, many volunteers never received their packets at
all.

York reports that "Orca" was named "after the whale", "chosen to suggest that the project was bigger than anything any other campaign... had ever imagined".

Now some say the orca is the apex predator of the oceans because some are known to attack whales, but they aren't that big, and they aren't whales.

Here on the NW Pacific coast they eat salmon. As for the very few orcas known to dine on whale, all that ever makes it onto the orca menu are the young and weak. Even an orca pack hunting together can't stand up to an adult bull sperm or blue whale.

So the biggest, baddest thing the Romney campaign could imagine is a predator who almost always avoids attacking species its same size or larger, who when it does attack things its own size or bigger can only defeat the young and weak.

I didn't realize how solidly committed Republicans are, from the bottom to the top, to believing their own BS.

Its one thing for the back room types to bullshit the troops to keep up morale, but what they've done here is to publicly demonstrate they don't know how to assess reality at the most crucial time for them when it was obviously possible.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.